An Inconvenient Truth?
Posted in Current Events by John E. Pannell on August 30th, 2007 at 9:07 pm Be advised, I’m going to stray far afield of patches here.
Algore and fellow cultists in the Church of Earth Mother Gaia, as some call the Global Warming alarmists like to cite concensus in support of their pseudo-science. It turns out they’re right: there is consensus. The problem is that it disagrees with their politically and financially motivated positions.
The US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has published an article stating that less than half the published scientists endorse the current theory on Global Warming. I’m waiting for all the talking heads to start citing this new consensus.
Score one for the so-called “deniers”.
"When you have eliminated the impossible, what ever remains, however improbable must be the truth."
(1) This is not a report of the US Senate Commitee on Environment and Public Works. It is from the minority (Republican) members of the committee–specifically an entry on the “Inhofe EPW Press Blog”–not from the whole committee. It is far more accurately described as a “blog posting” than as an article from a Senate committee.
(2) Once something achieves a certain level of consensus, related scientific papers generally stop specifically endorsing it and just go ahead and use it as context for other research. So, for example, a very small proportion of recent articles on biology actually “endorse evolution”–they simply use evolutionary theory to frame and support their research.
(3) Nothing in the article makes it clear whether the “neutral” papers explicitly say the evidence is inadequate or whether they simply don’t address the conclusion one way or another. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
(4) The blog posting itself makes clear that far fewer articles reject the “consensus” than endorse it. So what’s being argued here is whether a majority conclusion (45% accept a causal role for humans, 6% reject it, a 7.5:1 ratio of acceptance to rejection) is or is not sweeping enough to be regarded as consensus.
(5) The article claims that the “database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world”–but to really evaluate the evidence we need to know not whether the database includes all the good journals but whether it excludes the crackpots and the industry-funded PR rags. Otherwise this is not at all a test of scientific consensus but rather of the quality of the database publisher’s screening procedures.
(6) The Asher article “has been submitted for publication in” a journal–which means that the author has access to a printer and a postage stamp. So far, that’s a threshold not much higher than a blog posting.
(7) Further, looking at the original article which Asher tries to “update”, you can see that in that case all of the articles which took “no position” on humanity’s role in climate change were articles on methodology or paleoclimate analysis which did not attempt to address the issue of the human role. Counting articles which do not address a question as if they were unable to support a particular answer to that question is fundamentally dishonest.
You make my own points in trying to refute them.
This is a report/posting/publication of a Sentate committee MINORITY. They would have no say, without at least the tacit consent of the majority.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is not a consensus that Man is ruining the planet.
The current theory tha some like to tout so much is just a theory with many aspects of an idolatrous religion. Our international rivals push it to support political policies that would harm this while specifically exempting themselves (China and India) or by acting in a way to indicate they will not follow said policies (Russia). Nevermind that the political leader pushing this faith stands to be generously rewarded by folks who buy his “indulgences”.
Yes, man pollutes the environment. Yes, conservation is good when i makes economics sense — even I drive a small care and use CFLs. But man is destroying the environment on a global scales and cataclysmic disasters will rain down upon us? Just a theory, with many aspect of a religion.
Some like to point to current weather as evidence that we are destroying the Earth. As for our current Summer here, just look back to 1952-54. There’s some interesting local stories here about what happened then and how the environment recovered just nicely.
The inconvenient truth is that man made global warming is not proven science.
(This comment was trapped by WordPress as potential spam and didn’t get published when Dave submitted it. I have added my own comments to his, preceded by “–”. It’s obvious we will not agree on this topic. I’m too skeptical.)
First, note that it’s not just a minority report but is specifically a blog under the name of James Inhofe, who is so deranged on the topic of global warming that he runs around comparing climate scientists to Nazis.
– Calling them Nazis is extreme. Most who misuse this label have no idea of the horrors of Germany’s National Socialist government. All that aside, incredibly some of their *political* positions are not too far from that sort of socialist totalitarianism!
I would suggest reading some online reactions to that paper before you cite it enthusiastically.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/08/classifying_abstracts_on_globa.php
– I reported it. There is no universal consensus on man-made Global Warming. It’s more a political philosophy or religion than scientific theory.
Asher is a surgeon who has never previously written or published articles on climate science.
– And the good surgeon seems to have more sense than some of these ‘experts’.
The journal that the article is said to appear in, /Energy and Environment/, is not an established journal with a history of publishing quality research; rather, it is a recently created journal whose editor is a political scientist–which, having formerly been in the field, I must point out strains the definition of “scientist” . A database search apparently suggests it is subscribed to by a grand total of 25 libraries in the entire world.
– So what. Al Gore is a seminary drop out and failed presidential candidate. Leonardo diCaprio is an actor, so can we discredit their sermons on Global Warming, too? Neither of them are scientists. Oh… they’re ok because a lot of libraries have their works.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/aug/policy/pt_skeptics.html/
So yes, the Senate website is entirely correct–a surgeon with no climatological background has searched some database of climate-related articles; by describing those that do not address the question of human-caused global warming as being “neutral” on the issue he has concluded that such “neutrality” should offset the conclusions of the vast majority of studies which actually address the question; and he has submitted the article to a nonrefereed journal of no repute whatsoever.
– Why would he submit it to his philosophical and political opponents for their review? That would be like Grand Ayatollah Sistani submitting his proposed Friday prayers and sermons to the Vatican for approval and validation.
When such an article appears in a peer-reviewed journal with one-tenth the subscription base of /Science/–where the original article appeared as I linked to above–I might begin to take it seriously.
– When the so-called experts can tell us how the last Ice Age (or any of the ones prior to that) ended without the benefit of man’s destructive behavior, or even what caused and ended the Little Ice Age, I might take them seriously.
Ever notice the resemblance between Algore and Pol Pot?
http://www.lumponablog.com/?p=321
When one of the supporters of the current “global warming is a fact and we’re all going to die due to the failed policies of George W. Bush and his Haliburton cronies” can explain to me how the Ice Age could end without benefit of internal combustion engines, I will acknowledge that they may have a point.
But until such time, as far as I am concerned they are all a bunch of anti-private property Socialists.